‘We know how you feel,’ she said.
‘I lost a pet macaw once,’ Walter said, but Emmy gave him a sharp look and he stopped. Disorientated, I did my best to focus on Walter’s yellow storm-hat. It made Walter look like a fireman.
‘His name was Mac,’ Walter said.
I wanted to blame someone. Then it would somehow make sense. I stared hard at Walter’s bell-shaped hat, wondering if a man his age would remember dropping a lit pipe into a waste-paper bin full of paper. Dry paper. And old wooden pencils.
‘It’s not Walter’s fault,’ Emmy said. ‘He came up to the Club so that we could have some time on our own.’
‘He did all the right things,’ Theo said. ‘He called 999 and then he called us.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘My mother only bought it because of the label.’
However much I blinked it kept on happening, over and over again. Bananas asleep in the bean-bag. The tobacco starting to burn. Bananas waking up, sitting up straight, breathing in deeply. His nose twitching and his green-marbled eyes smiling themselves Chinese. His back straightening. His tail sweeping slowly one way and then the other, brushing the old black corduroy of the bean-bag.
‘The bad news or the good news?’
Julian had to shout to make himself heard. He was the only one of us properly dressed for the weather, in his charcoal overcoat and black leather gloves. ‘The back of the house is burnt-out,’ he said, in a more normal voice now that he was closer, ‘but the front is almost completely untouched.’
‘Fancy that,’ Theo said.
‘They’re looking for clues as to how it started, but the main thing is that nobody was hurt. Thank God.’
‘Gregory has had a shock,’ Theo said.
‘We’ve all had a shock,’ Julian said.
When nobody disagreed with him, he walked back towards the fire-engines.
‘I loved that cat.’
‘He wouldn’t have suffered,’ Theo said.
‘We don’t know.’
‘800 degrees centigrade.’
Trembling with pleasure, perched on the bean-bag, his body alive with sensual satisfaction. He is always about to jump, to escape, but the smell of burning tobacco changes slightly as different plants reach different stages of combustion, a little more interesting, a little more intense. The work-bench flames then collapses and the arm-chair explodes, but the bean-bag remains cool and intact, living up to its label. Bananas, eyes wide and green, inhales deeply, smiles, disappears slowly behind veils of blue-green smoke.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘It’s never easy,’ Emmy said.
‘I blame myself.’
‘There was nothing you could do.’
‘I shouldn’t have introduced him to ashtrays.’
‘He would have died happy,’ Theo said. ‘Charged up with nicotine. He beat the discomfort that comes from knowing that satisfaction never lasts. He was satisfied without end. It was the perfect death.’
‘Not dead but happily sleeping,’ Walter said.
‘Dead, burnt,’ I said. ‘Gone forever.’
Against 800 degrees of heat the bean-bag had been defenceless. It had forgotten its promise to my mother. It had been no help to Bananas. It could do nothing to protect its memory of Lucy’s back and buttocks. The frailty of the bean-bag led to an eradication so thorough I was left stunned, unable to think clearly.
‘It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Death is natural,’ Walter said.
‘And it really is possible to die happy,’ Theo said. ‘I promise you.’
‘He’ll always live on,’ Emmy assured me, ‘in our memories.’
And I was just beginning to consider believing them when Julian came back.
‘Damp in the wiring,’ he said. He looked at Theo. ‘This wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed at Buchanan’s. Your plants would have been safe.’
‘I don’t want to argue,’ Theo said. ‘Not here.’
‘Why should we argue? This isn’t your problem. This isn’t even your house.’
‘I was thinking of Gregory.’
‘Anyway, it could have been much worse.’
Julian then told us that the front room wasn’t even water-damaged, and still not thinking properly all I could say was thankyou. He said that’s what friends were for.
‘I loved that cat.’
Julian slapped me on the back.
‘Cheer up, Gregory,’ he said. ‘It might never happen.’
‘You look dreadful,’ Ginny said. ‘Why did you come?’
‘Madame Boyard said I should. What happened to your shirt?’
I looked down and saw it was full of tiny burn-holes.
‘You didn’t think I’d just let you go?’ she said.
It was more than a week since I’d been to the library, and I’d spent most of that time walking around Paris. Each morning, to give myself a sense of purpose, I devised a complex itinerary, bristling with rules. I had to make long detours, for example, to avoid the red diamond signs outside tobacconists, or I would set out for Montparnasse at night-time, never deviating from a route which connected every cinema on the Left Bank showing a black and white film, preferably in French, but always with a W in the title. Wherever I went, following whatever rules, I boldly tested the theory of love at first sight by looking at a lot of girls for the first time.
I started counting churches, equestrian statues, Italian restaurants, anything to distract my mind from the need to make decisions. I stared at monuments until they all became alike. I walked like a man asleep, simply an occupied space which no-one approached, drifting along behind black-haired girls and old ladies smoking lucky cigarettes. Gradually, I began to lose the forward momentum in which life could be recognized, but I never let myself go completely: my touristic itineraries were a source of vigilance, a tabling of time. They were an effort at containment and gave me an easy, easily achieved sense of satisfaction, however temporary.
I could have gone on like this indefinitely, sleeping and walking and continuing to live, not insensitive but neutral, meaningless, like a rat abandoned in a lab. My mother was wrong, and nothing terrible happened to me. Disasters didn’t exist, or they were elsewhere, even though the tiniest catastrophe might have been enough to teach me what I wanted to defend, either Lucy, or Ginny, or my imaginary magnificent future. But I wasn’t ill and my days weren’t numbered. In fact, if anything, each day still seemed used, peeled back at the edges, like a page which had already been written, bound, published, studied, studied again, dog-eared and over-read until nothing could be learnt from it. It left me with a sense of dissatisfaction so vague I was almost ashamed.
I didn’t read history anymore, because life wasn’t a conundrum I could solve by reading. Instead, I collected books of matches from careless restaurants, and back in my room, late at night, I practised striking them into my cupped hands like Humphrey Bogart in Paris in Casablanca. I burnt holes in my shirts. I held burning matches upside down and watched the flame climb towards my fingers, thinking that the match was an honest object. It made no pretence at being solid or dependable in my hands.
‘You’ve got holes all over the front of your shirt,’ Ginny said.
And I hadn’t shaved and I wasn’t wearing shoes or socks. But then Ginny wasn’t going to the opera either. She took off her denim jacket and hung it on the door-handle. She was wearing her vanilla ice-cream dress, the short one with the strawberries. No glasses.
‘I told you I wouldn’t give up,’ she said, and I remembered that while walking it had always been in the back of my mind that Ginny had an answer to all this. She believed in the absolutism and the absolution of love, and there was always the possibility that she was right.
I moved further along the bed to make room for her, but when the soft mattress sagged us together we both leant the other way, resisting the tendency of the bed. Ginny kicked off her trainers and drew her legs up beneath her, and we both bounced softly on the soft
mattress. She blinked brightly.
‘Contact lenses,’ she said.
‘You should wear your glasses.’
‘Do you prefer me in glasses?’
‘Ginny.’
‘Do you like me at all, Gregory? You’ve treated me appallingly.’
‘I haven’t been feeling very well.’
She pushed herself up onto her knees and turned to face me, balancing herself against the wall until the bed stopped moving. She sat back on her heels. Then she crossed her arms over her chest and between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and she had beautiful hands, she took hold of the thin straps which held up her dress.
‘I have everything Lucy has,’ she said.
I could think of nothing to say back to her. Slowly, she peeled the straps off her shoulders and rolled the dress over her breasts until it lay crimped around her stomach. She abandoned the straps at her elbows. She was wearing nothing under the dress, but I didn’t let that impress me. It was all meaningless, and a little sad, because I wasn’t going to let her excite me. It wouldn’t be fair on Lucy.
Ginny knew what I was thinking. She took a deep disappointed breath and her lungs filled with air, lifted her upturned breasts, held them trembling for a second, and then let them fall again.
She pulled the straps of the dress free of her arms. I looked closely at the material gathered around her stomach. I didn’t know how to tell her it wasn’t working, but then she leant over to the door-handle and reached into the pocket of her denim jacket. She brought out a single cigarette and a lighter, and swayed back to face me again, still kneeling. She put the cigarette between her lips.
‘Your larynx,’ I said, pushing myself upright on the bed, pulling my feet up beneath me.
She wiped an eyebrow, and then moved the cigarette to the side of her mouth. Her lips relaxed and the cigarette dropped to a rakish angle I recognized from old films. I knelt in front of her, fascinated.
‘Your vocal cords,’ I said.
The cigarette twitched when she breathed.
‘My lungs,’ she said, the cigarette jerking. ‘Is this how Lucy does it?’
I nodded.
She held the lighter in both hands and scratched a flame from it. She raised it towards her mouth, and the white insides of her arms pushed against her breasts.
‘Watch me,’ she said. ‘Watch me do it too.’
DAY
18
Each week Theo smoked fewer cigarettes, and we all knew he was dying. Indomitable, Walter went out of his way to find the Celtiques he used to like, and then pointed out the significance of winter in relation to Theo’s cough. As winter moved towards spring, Walter started blaming the house: the toxic dust created by lab-building, or microscopic ash residue from the fire.
Emmy told him to stop.
‘Theo is dying of lung cancer from smoking cigarettes,’ she said.
Love had changed Emmy, as if she’d eventually accepted her destiny always to fall in love with smokers. She thought it might be an oedipal thing. Once, she even confessed to a grudging respect for the recklessness needed to smoke. It was like an appeal to God for special consideration, and although there were other ways to appeal to God, like mountain-climbing and motorcycle-racing, neither of these had ever interested the men she loved.
Theo made it absolutely clear that he didn’t want to spend his last weeks in hospital. He didn’t like the way doctors poked at him and drained him, as if measurements would explain everything. He especially didn’t like the eager young housemen who asked him very politely whether he’d mind his lungs being preserved for use in lectures to school-children. After he was dead, of course.
He preferred to be at home, among unreasonable people.
We now lived exclusively in the front of the house, and from his chair in the Suicide Club Theo would sometimes send Jamie to the bookmakers. He still bet on the favourites, but now he always lost. It made him happy, confirming that he’d understood something of the laws which governed his life, and each failed bet temporarily restored his strength. It was at times like these, when twenty-to-one outsiders romped home ahead of champions, that Theo and Emmy cheerfully sorted out money and the cremation and what would happen to Haemoglobin when Theo was gone. Theo gave me the key to the flat in the Estates.
‘What should I do with this?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s up to you.’
As Theo’s cough became worse, Jamie started running faster to the bookies, scared that Theo might die before he made it back. But Theo, whenever he felt strong enough, seemed. less concerned with his own health than he was with mine.
‘You could give up, you know, if you wanted to.’
‘I know I could.’
‘Tomorrow, if you wanted.’
Jamie had just rushed back from the betting shop with the astounding news that Wales, the worst team in the Five Nations tournament, had beaten the favourites France in Cardiff. Theo was feeling good.
‘It’s not the same for me,’ he said. ‘Smoking wasn’t a retreat. It was a kind of contest.’
‘Theo, you’re dying.’
’So I lost. But I still took Him on.’
‘This is to do with Julian, isn’t it?’
‘You’re more than a statistic, Gregory. You’re better than that.’
Before the effect of the Welsh victory could wear off, I told Theo that Julian still blamed him for holding back the plants he’d cultivated in the lab. ‘He reckons they could have saved thousands of lives.’
‘And him being such an expert on life and death.’
But then his chest began to hurt him again and he didn’t elaborate.
I tried not to think too much about life after Theo. Instead, I found comfort in my weekly routine, glad that some things stayed the same. Twice a week, every week, I ran up to the medical-room at the Unit, where strangers plugged me into machines to see exactly what cigarettes had done to me. They swabbed my eyes for amblyopia and inspected my sweat for alkalis. They examined my blood for its measurable O’s of oxygen, and asked me if I ever felt anxious. And no matter how worried I said I was, they always gave me a clean bill of health. They told me that nothing was wrong with me, and then handed over enough cigarettes at twenty a day to last me until the next appointment. The whole procedure was familiar and consoling, and in need of such comfort, I continued smoking exactly 20 cigarettes a day, the same as always.
Naturally, Julian always knew where to find me. He would sometimes dawdle around the medical-room, examining wall-charts and testing the sharpness of scalpels against his thumb.
‘It’s nearly ten years since Hamburg,’ he said.
I watched dark blood leave my arm by fat syringe.
‘We should think about a new contract.’
‘If that’s alright by me.’
‘Well obviously,’ Julian said. ‘I’ll forgive you for the day you smoked more than twenty. You’ve been under a lot of stress, what with Theo and everything.’
Julian looked at a screen and tapped some keys. ‘Hardly a day of illness in almost ten years,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a great help, Gregory. We’d like you to continue.’
I appreciated Julian’s more cautious approach. It proved that my fighting talk about giving up must have made an impression, even though the truth was I’d become so used to smoking I could hardly imagine what not smoking would be like. Theo was dying, and my Carmens were too valuable a comfort to think of discarding. And anyway, nothing was wrong with my health, and my income depended on it. There was no pressing reason to stop.
’So I’ll draw up the paperwork then?’ Julian said.
‘Yes,’ I said. Tine.’
I didn’t tell Theo. He was hardly smoking at all now and I didn’t want to upset him, but then Jamie burst in, waving Theo’s betting slip, gabbling the news that an overweight forty-five-year-old Seventh Day Adventist had just become heavyweight boxing champion of the world.
Inspired, Theo sat up in his chair and
remembered some Buchanan’s gossip he’d always been meaning to pass on, about the Hamburg labs. It was some years ago, and there was a refugee from the Ukraine, a former Olympic gymnast, who’d developed a cancer during some tests designed by Julian. Carr always claimed that the cancer pre-dated the tests, but after questions from the German press he eventually admitted that the Ukrainian, among others, was being paid to smoke cigarettes. Buchanan’s immediately issued a statement denying responsibility. They entirely agreed that exposing human subjects to potentially cancer-inducing agents, merely to establish causality, was morally and ethically unacceptable.
Julian was then publicly dismissed from his post.
‘As for the gymnast,’ Theo said, but the effect of the bet was wearing off and he couldn’t finish the sentence.
His lucid moments became increasingly infrequent, no matter what shock defeats Jamie brought back from the betting shop. On March 2 Theo laid no bets and smoked no cigarettes. We took him into hospital, and he died the next day, at twenty past eight in the evening. He had a bet with Walter that he’d last at least another week.
She lit the cigarette and puffed out a little smoke without inhaling.
‘Lucy doesn’t do it like that,’ I said. ‘She breathes it all in.’
She took the cigarette out of her mouth and checked it was still alight. I was breathing heavily, trying to inhale any smoke which side-streamed towards me.
’She inhales as deeply as she can into her lungs,’ I said.
Ginny put the cigarette back between her lips. Smoke swirled into her eyes and she blinked hard. She should have worn her glasses. I concentrated on the tip of the cigarette and Ginny’s face lost focus, merging into the pale background behind the ember beneath the ash at the end of the burning cigarette.
It lifted slightly as she sucked on it, favouring her lower lip. The cigarette paper crackled, burned, and the red ember chased a centimetre closer to the filter before it was surrounded again with ash, white more than grey. Ginny took the cigarette out of her mouth, closed her lips around the smoke. I imagined it settling behind her teeth, on her tongue.
X20 Page 21